In the earlier case of Aston v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government [2013] EWHC 1936 (Admin), the court was unwilling to accept that the phrase “major development” should have a uniform meaning wherever it appeared in a policy document, procedural rule or government guidance relevant to town and country planning. (There, the phrase fell to be interpreted in the context of paragraph 116 of the NPPF.) The claimant had argued unsuccessfully for the definition in Article 2(1) of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) Order 2010 (“the DMPO”) to be imported.
A similar approach has since been taken by the court in R (on the application of Trevone Objectors Group) v The Cornwall Council [2013] EWHC 4091 (Admin). There, a developer had applied for planning permission for the construction of 15 affordable dwellings within an AONB. The local planning authority (“LPA”) concluded that the development was a “Schedule 2 development” for the purposes of the (then in force) Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) (England and Wales) Regulations 1999. It went on to adopt a negative screening opinion, and later granted full planning permission.
The LPA’s local plan, at paragraph 5.31, stated that all “major development” proposals in an AONB should be accompanied by an environmental statement. Given the negative screening opinion, no environmental statement had been submitted in this case. The claimant sought to quash the grant of planning permission, one of its grounds being failure on the part of the LPA to have regard to and/or apply its policy in paragraph 5.31 of the local plan. It argued specifically that the definition of “major development” in Article 2(1) of the DMPO includes the provision of dwelling houses, where the number to be provided is ten or more.
The court rejected this ground, holding that it would be wrong to import the meaning of “major development” set out in Article 2(1) of the DMPO. Whether a development constituted a “major development”, in a context such as this, was a matter of planning judgment for the relevant decision-maker on a case by case basis. For example, a proposal for 30 houses might be a “major development” in a very small village but not in a city. Furthermore, the meaning given to the phrase in Article 2(1) was not the ordinary meaning in planning law.
John Martin is a planning law consultant
